One of the age groups hit hardest by the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK has been young people aged 16 to 24 years old. While the country now has nearly 700,000 fewer workers of all ages in employment compared with a year ago, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, under-25s account for a massive 60% of those who have lost their jobs. Unsurprisingly then, a recent report published by research and information service, the House of Commons Library, reveals that unemployment among young people rose by as much as 13% in the last quarter (October to December 2020) compared with the first quarter of the year (January to March 2020). As a result, 14.4% of them – the equivalent of 589,000 – are now out of work, the highest level since 2016 and up from 11.3% a year ago.
To make matters worse, though, because high numbers of under-25s have traditionally been employed in sectors such as hospitality and leisure, which have been badly affected by the country’s repeated lockdowns, the most likely age for employees to be furloughed now stands at 17. A key concern is that many more will lose their jobs when the scheme ends on 30 September. But the current relatively healthy position appears to stark contrast to this gloomy scenario. A Tech Nation report entitled ‘UK Tech for a Changing World’ shows that over the last two years, the industry has actually created 2.93 million both technical and non-technical jobs – a jump in employment terms of 40% – and now accounts for a significant 9% of the entire national workforce.
Moreover, Michael Houlihan, chief executive of Generation UK, a not-for-profit spin-out from management consultancy McKinsey & Co that provides intensive tech training programs for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, believes this growth in demand is unlikely to slow soon. “The UK will create three million tech jobs by 2025, which is huge and offers so much promise,” he says. “The problem is that not three million people are coming off the conveyor belt, and university, the traditional point of entry into tech, can only make a relatively small contribution of a few 100,000 over the next couple of years.”
The trouble with apprenticeships
But an inadequate graduate pipeline is not the only challenge the industry faces – apprenticeship provision is experiencing problems. For example, according to the Office for National Statistics, the number of apprenticeship places available last summer across all sectors plummeted by 45.5% compared with the same period the previous year as employers reined in expenditure. A study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development entitled Covid-19, and the youth labor market confirmed that 57% of medium-sized employers had declined to offer apprenticeship schemes over the previous 12 months, a figure that rose to nearly four out of five among small employers. Government incentives to try and reverse the decline also appeared to have little impact, with only 5% of employers saying they would consider hiring apprentices.
As a result, the experience of Ikra Masood, who joined networking giant Cisco’s scheme in 2020, is not uncommon. She applied to innumerable employers before finding success. Some said they lacked the resources to take apprentices on, and others could not confirm either future start dates or numbers of potential places. Paradoxically though, the economic situation and scarcity of other opportunities created by the pandemic encouraged Masood to move beyond her comfort zone and pursue a “more future-proof” career in tech in the first place. Although it was an area that had always interested her, she had previously lacked the confidence to go for it “because I never thought I’d be good at it”, she says.
Moreover, Vanessa Hua, who has a degree in neuroscience but took part in Generation UK’s 12-week Get into Data Engineering Bootcamp and is now a junior data engineer at comparethemarket.com, the industry as a whole can come across as somewhat offputting to outsiders. “People – and I know I did – feel like someone who works in tech looks a specific way, has a specific education, and comes from a specific background,” she says.
Lack of clarity and tough competition
Another thing that does not help is the length and vagueness of many job descriptions, making it unclear which “traits and skills the employer wants or needs”, says Hua. This situation makes candidates ask themselves whether “you should even bother applying because you think they won’t even look at you if you don’t have 100% of what they’re after.” Nonetheless, she does believe that tech has become an “increasingly popular career option recently”, not least because many young people were forced into home learning. This means that “they’ve come to understand how useful technology is and the central part it’s played in the pandemic”, which has opened their eyes to the possibilities it offers.
But despite this rising interest, says Aude Barral, co-founder of developer recruitment platform CodinGame, young workers, even with the requisite technical skills, are now facing “tough competition” for entry-level jobs. “The market for entry-level, operational tasks, such as front-end web development, is getting saturated, and the demand is much more for highly-skilled positions in areas, such as AI and cloud management,” she says. According to the company’s latest survey, the top three skill sets currently of most interest to employers are DevOps, followed by back-end and full-stack development capabilities, all of which require high levels of technical expertise and experience.
To make the situation even more complicated, says Barral, many organizations have become more reluctant to hire inexperienced personnel due to the challenges involved in mentoring and managing them remotely. “It can be hard supervising young employees remotely as they often need more support, and communication is very different in a remote working scenario,” she says. “Which is why, even in tech, younger candidates can have a real problem competing with those with more experience.”
The tech industry offers more than just technical jobs.
On the plus side, though, the tech industry consists of much more than just technical positions, as Kathryn Baddeley, Cisco’s head of corporate social responsibility. “Most young people love playing with tech, but they don’t necessarily see it as a career, and they’re not always aware of the wide range of options available,” she says. “It’s not just about coding – there are roles in sales, marketing, data science, and a host of other areas too.”
As a result, the company – which, unlike many of its peers, continued offering its apprenticeship scheme last year and doubled the intake to 60 people – runs a job rotation scheme to expose participants to as many options as possible and encourage networking. The program, which was first launched in 2011, now takes the form of a degree apprenticeship, and this year consisted of the “most diverse” group ever – 47% of participants were female, 42% were members of ethnic minorities, and 35% from disadvantaged communities.
But although the organization had no doubts about continuing to offer the scheme during the pandemic, Baddeley acknowledges it was necessary to tweak how things were done to support apprentices working remotely. “People who started working six months ago have never been into the office, so it’s harder for them to create networks and feel involved,” she says. “So we’ve put a lot of effort into allowing them to meet other people and have exposure to managers – the rotations help here as working with new colleagues automatically builds a network.” The apprentices are also encouraged to work on charity fundraising activities with others in their year group. They have had several meetings with key figures in the business, including the chief executive.
Taking a multi-pronged approach
Bev White, chief executive of recruitment consultancy Harvey Nash, believes that apprenticeships will become an increasingly important way for the tech sector to move beyond its current “undoubted over-reliance on graduates” over the next three years. As the economy begins to bounce back, she also hopes to see smaller, local firms resume hiring young people to help with tech support, thereby giving them work experience and “a foot in the door”, in many instances supported by the government’s £2 billion KickStart job placement scheme for young people on Universal Credit.
Generation UK’s Houlihan likewise believes that a multi-pronged approach to skills development will be vital to plug the UK’s tech skills gap truly. For example, in highly technical fields, such as cybersecurity and AI, he agrees that graduate education is crucial. Computer science apprenticeships sit in the middle to provide learners with structured, ongoing training and paid work experience, in his view, while programs such as those offered by his organization help make young people “job-ready” in critical areas, such as cloud management, data science, and software engineering.
“Training provision for young people is continuing to be dialed up – universities will remain a significant part of the system and, while apprenticeships have been under-utilized in the tech sector so far, they will become more critical,” says Houlihan. “But boot camps, whether delivered by the private sector or social enterprises like us, will become increasingly important too, with each strata having its role to play.”
